Adam Back

It's a far cry from what some members of the tech community did when the government was trying to restrict code and cryptography in the 1990s. People were tattooing perl scripts onto their bodies in order to protest the restrictions. God forbid people break the law to protest bad laws. "How to become an Arms Trafficker Become an Arms-Trafficker in one easy step with this great way to register your protest of ITAR by Vince Cate. Just click to submit the form and join in the protest. Lots of excellent links. Have you exported RSA today? Includes an option to email a protest letter to US president." [0] [0] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/

Reminds me of when someone saw that the NSA's public key (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html) to be included in Lotus Notes had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother". Moloch isn't the good guy in Howl. Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

More illegal crypto T-Shirts: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html This was one of my favorite shirts, but it finally gave up the ghost a few years ago.

Sorry, I don't think I understand your argument. Could you try it a different way? In the 1990s crypto war there were great points to be made that encryption and authentication are technologically dual to each other, that encryption algorithms are simple, and that knowledge of cryptographic techniques can no longer be monopolized by governments. There were also great points to be made that businesses and governments strongly desired modern encryption technology, and that protecting individuals against mass surveillance sounded like a good idea from the vantage point of many different political and ethical theories. So, the 1990s encryption control approach was super-fragile because it was notionally based on controlling access to knowledge (and also the nationalist part about preventing that knowledge from reaching foreigners, or something). One classic artifact of the old crypto war (you know, when crypto meant "cryptography") is the RSA e-mail signature / t-shirt http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ while another is CipherSaber, the attempt to get people to learn how to implement the RC4 cipher from scratch http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/ Both of these seem to be based on the shared understanding between the government and privacy activists that knowing how to implement cryptographic primitives is a super-big deal that must either be strictly controlled or made ubiquitous (depending on your view of the moral valence of civilian cryptography). In the present environment, we…

Some (well, at least one) of us are old enough to have owned one of these: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html A t-shirt with a Perl script that implemented RSA encryption strong enough to be technically illegal to export from the US. (I must sadly admit to being too cowardly/sensible to have taken that shirt to the US in the late 90s...)

Oh, I definitely wore my Perl RSA "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/ DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6283084

Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages. The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete. [1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

The export-restricted perl munition t-shirt text: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/ #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+dlMLa^lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj

Picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(front).jpg The code: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/design/

How course there are, why would an employee be aware of them? http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

There was that old RSA in a sig file... #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) You'll note on that last line a |dc` as all of that stuff after the `echo` gets packed into something for dc to run. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/rsa-details.html

They could always print it on a T-Shirt, sing it (70's folk protest song style), or print it out in book form, then mail it overseas to be OCR'ed. Those strategies worked for RSA. Anyone have a link to the RSA song? Here's a link to the T-Shirt design: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/

Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. No? http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/

Also, dc was the math engine for the old RSA in five lines of perl. http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/pureperl.html Clearly a powerful tool.

Diffie-Hellman in 2 lines of perl: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/perl-dh.html an the T-shirt: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html

This page is still up and running and I always thought this hack was pretty awesome: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/

Maybe custom response header would be the ideal place to insert output from something like Emacs spook: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/spook.html

Well, I would think so as well, but we have at least some anecdata (N=1) in the other direction [0]: > In doing this I discovered that the NSA public key had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother". Specifically what I saw in my debugger late one night, which was spooky for a short moment was: O=MiniTruth CN=Big Brother [0]: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

RSA used to be export restricted by ITAR, and the situation became a running joke. There's a Perl 3 liner made into a t-shirt that was subject to the regulation. http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ I think someone also got it tattooed on them.

He knew he'd be targeted (and he was), legal or not. It's probably why whoever wrote Bitcoin used a nom de chiffere. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/timeline/

I had the RSA "this shirt is a munition" t-shirt that was technically illegal to take outside of the United States due to export controls. Though, it wasn't 1/100th as ugly as this block of graffiti spam. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html

I still have that t-shirt in my drawer. If you've not seen it, here's a link: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html

If they can have a backdoor in Lotus Notes, what else can't they have a backdoor into? Do a search for "ibm lotus backdoor" or start from http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

> Then you look at them, determine their intent (to publish Bill's SSN) and punish them or not accordingly. That sounds like a very pragmatic view of the legal system. I'm more idealistic so I'd rather say that you have to "prove" (rather than "determine") their intent before you can punish them. ;P Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, but there absolutely are times when the "geeks" win. For example consider export control for cryptographic algorithms which was thoroughly ridiculed by "geeks" [1] and later scrapped IIRC. 1. http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/

Surely some of the folks here also wore the Perl RSA implementation on a t-shirt back in the mid 90s: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ A lot of comments here are talking about how the author is mistaken about the security of RC4. The point of this post, and the t-shirt, is that it's dumb on many, many levels to ban cryptography.

Would be cool to plug M-x spook (http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/spook.html) into text to speech and play it for good old Alexa more or less not stop...

Here's a page with the relevant images: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/

There was the RSA t-shirt which supposedly could be classified as a munition because the source code on the shirt would provide a high enough level of encryption: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/uk-shirt.html PGP released a really nicely bound version of their source code typeset in an OCR font that they exported because a book would theoretically fall under the First Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigatio…

The tatoo was a short bit of Perl code implementing RSA. Details here: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/

That's why the generally design the backdoor so that it's based on a key that only they have. For example, with Dual EC DRBG, researchers discovered that it would be possible to create the constants based on another constant, with which you could predict the output easily. But without prior knowledge of that constant, it would be an infeasible brute-force search to find it. Likewise, previous publicly known backdoors like the one in the export version of Lotus Notes depended on a key that the NSA had. There it was even simpler, and not obfuscated; it would just encrypt a portion of the session key with the NSA's public key, which they could decrypt and the easily brute-force the rest of the session key.[1] The NSA doesn't want to make security weak against arbitrary attackers, they just want to give themselves the keys. [1]: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html